


I'll never be your chosen one

by Fake_Brit



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Piz pov of the movie, What Have I Done, longest work I've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 21:06:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2887907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fake_Brit/pseuds/Fake_Brit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[LoVe through Piz's eyes during the movie]<br/><i>" [...] Epic never fades or stops or dies. Epic just I s. [...]" </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll never be your chosen one

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, what have I done? Being the fierce LoVe shipper I am, after rewatching the movie yet again I thought Rob had been unfair to Piz, so here's what I've come up with. Let me know if you liked it.

Veronica comes home that day and there’s something in her face – not just her eyes. Yeah, sure, they are suddenly as bright as the sun and he can’t look away because he hasn’t seen them like that in a long time, but the thing that throws him completely off the tracks is her smile. Lips barely curving up, her teeth flashing a white so clear for a moment that his eyes ache – catches him off guard, and he stumbles backward into their apartment, the one they’ve been sharing for the past six months. _Or is it seven?_ He wonders silently. 

“So, how’d it go?” He asks, as a gnawing feeling starts poking at his stomach, harder with each second that crawls by in silence. “Am I looking at the best ass-kicking lawyer-to-be in New York City?” His tone is light-hearted, but it gets no sarcastic or satisfied retort such as _“You betcha”_ or _“What did you expect? Ye of little faith,”_ out of her mouth. She doesn’t even nudge him.

All of sudden, it feels like the ground under Piz’s feet is shaking and crumbling and taking away all of his certainties, leaving him shuddering in the cold arms of doubt.

One breath of silence.

Two.

Three.

Four.

She stops him mid-breath, saying, “I’m going back to Neptune,” in a low, uncharacteristically serious voice.

In the space of nanoseconds – of a sentence. Short, compact and, obviously, coming from _Veronica Mars,_ as sharp-edged as they come – the feeling isn’t just a feeling anymore and it all dawns on him incredibly fast: this is happening, Piznarski. It’s real.

( _The ground has crumbled and shaken and cracked open under him and the void isn’t exactly warm and fuzzy_ )

-:-

He doesn’t need to ask why she decided to go back to, and he’s quoting, _that hell mouth_ , out of the blue, of course.

She doesn’t clarify, either. His name hangs in the room, unspoken and heavy with meaning. _As usual_ , he thinks, but does not say, as she walks the apartment from one corner to the other while packing.

He protests, – because, damn it all, he’s still afraid of Logan – but she doesn’t even blink, reassuring him about how she would be doing this for any wrongly accused old acquaintance. At the word _acquaintance_ , his stomach dips towards his feet so fast he feels dizzy.

He’s no idiot: it’s a lie, a blatant one at that, but he takes it. He takes it, and hopes this is a momentary turbulence and that it will pass leaving their lives untouched.

He takes her to the airport with a smile on his face, kissing her goodbye as though this trip didn’t feel like a punch and kick and a bite andhypothermia and combusting all at once and yet slowly.

( _He knows how it will end. He knows it deep in his bones. Can already see it, actually: she will smile, sweetly, and cut him dead with the truth. Epic never fades or stops or dies. Epic just I s. Permanent. Unshakable. Untouchable. Undeniable. No matter how firmly you try to deem it so. How far away you run. How much truth you throw in a lie._

_ It still is a lie.) _

But he loves her. And he pretends.

-:-

He flies to the reunion because he hasn’t lost hope yet, despite how much more lively she sounds just by being in Neptune.

He swallows it, though. He’s a lover, and lovers hope ‘till their last breath.

He shakes his head at the worry that knocks on his door at night.

If he hopes hard enough, he muses, she may stay. As his lips form this words, his throat barely contains a choked, dry laugh. _Keep dreaming, kiddo._

The reunion is held in this incredibly posh place, which is surprisingly packed with people above their twenties that seem stuck in the college phase. It’s weird, Piz thinks. Also, totally cringe-worthy.

When he spots Veronica – back in black, wary and distant. _God, this is too much of a shitty memory lane. Maybe, just maybe_ , his inner voice stretches the may like some kind of creepy high note in a song, resembling the shriek of an alarm or the cry of Odysseus’ sirens –- too dramatic. Back to how his girlfriend in black is a mindfuck, please. (And obviously, because he’s Stosh Piznarski – in a relationship with Veronica Mars – it’s not a thrilling mindfuck, the one that he’s going through here and now, feet glued to this very spot. Nope. It’s scary. And if he doesn’t move his eyes away and get his brain to analyze anything but what black – Neptune – means in Veronica’s cryptic-as-hell language, he’s gonna break. For good.) _If I’m lucky enough, this is a nightmare and I’m going to wake up and be in my bed in New York, holding my girlfriend of one year and a half for some morning cuddling and the biggest freak out cause is the fact that the aforementioned girlfriend will meet my parents and probably run away in shame in a few days. This is reality. Not the fact_ , he exhales slowly, squeezing his eyes shut against the dread that has been piling up on his shoulders ever since she boarded the plane that has taken her back here. Back to him. He swallows as the rest of the thought hits him like a train wreck. 

Swift. 

Painful. 

Sudden. 

But then again, not so much if he’s being honest. _Not the fact that she came back for someone that made her life a painful mess. In the place where she’d been inflicted most of her wounds, that is. Biggest cherry on the fucked-up cake ever, really._

Piz breaks out of his of his reverie the moment the sex tape – that damn thing – moves on the screen and all hell breaks loose.

People start throwing punches and he realizes that if there’s a place on Earth which embodies Shakespeare’s _hell is empty and all the devils are here_ , that place is, without a glimmer of doubt, Neptune.

Of course, in the center of the bloodbath, is the sole reason of his turmoil – dread, worry, insecurity, the elephant in his relationship so to speak – snarling and hitting. Maybe he’s still nineteen, nursing the hellish beating Logan gave him, and nine years haven’t passed.

He stands there, frozen in awe for a second, feeling weirdly empathic to the Parides to his Menelaus and then, as he notices Veronica’s brow furrowing at Logan, snaps back into awareness. 

“Piznarski, no,” she says, voice barely audible over the roar of the hungry crowd. Looks like they’re feasting on adrenaline, he mutters to himself – or maybe murmurs it out loud? – _just like Veronica, back in college._

He decides he is going to try it, maybe, this way, he will stop waiting for Logan’s phantom to come and snatch her away while she’s here – or, worse yet, deciding he wants her back, _again_ , and so following them to New York.

Piz barely has the chance to land a hit – which, of course, is pitiful. _You’re a good guy, a lover. Not a warrior, remember?_ His own argument echoes through his head, sounding a lot – irrevocably, in fact – like doom.

_ The doom he’s always known she would lead him to. _

_ (You’re not him. _

_ You _

_ Are  _

_ Not  _

_ Logan _

_ And you never will be) _

Later, when the fight end in being wet and bruised, Veronica tears her eyes – _her attention. Her ~~care~~_ . C’mon, Piz, get real, man, _her love –_ away from Logan andbrings themback to what’s solid and not a fantasy – i.e. her cut and not-so-mainly boyfriend – he discovers he cannot hate Logan Echolls, newly reformed asshole.

He approaches them and says, shyly and politely – who. The. Fuck. Is. He. He remembers anger and rudeness and threats. Not this – “Thanks for jumping in, Piz”

Veronica leaps off him, as though he were fire and she’d just gotten burnt, and follows Logan, her face moving in a silent conversation.

_ Thanks,  _ she utters with her bright eyes.

_ No problem there, V, I’d do anything you asked and, also, anything to anyone who mistreats you. a l w a y s. Radio silence be damned.(and you know it don’t you?) _ , says his run for distance because, who would know Logan had it in him to stop when he saw someone else having a go at happiness with ~~his girl~~ Veronica. Good God, the guy messes with his sanity even without meaning to. _Howin the world does he do that?_

-:-

When he leaves Keith’s house on the following day, he makes on last attempt at being sure of himself – no, of them. _Their relationship._

Even as she says her goodbye to him – still giving in to the illusion that they are gonna make it past this, that it’s just helping a friend what she is doing back here – he can see she’s not into it, that her mind is far away, busy with evidence, reconstruction, uncovering the guilty ones, spying on them.

The kiss they share is intimate – a sign of a stable relationship, people who don’t know the truth would point that out for sure – for him, though, it tastes like the final cut, like the distance that is going to be the only existing thing between them alongside past history from now on.

He should make it official, rip the Band-Aid off. He doesn’t. He reminds her his parents will be waiting for the Veronica Mars he sold them – a fake – and leaves her to Neptune’s iron grip, holding painfully onto the last shreds of hope.

He’s a coward and, he knows, Veronica Mars doesn’t do cowards.

_ (No, she does complicated. Epic. Mess. Drama.) _

-:-

He finally mans up enough to call her when he finds himself stalling outside of a hotel in New York, his parents growing impatient by the minute.

_ Deep breaths, Piznarski, you can do it. C’mon, it’s not like you’re dumping her while drunk out of paranoia. You knew it would’ve come down to this when she told you about the call _ – which, to be honest, feels like eons ago. Yep, she has infected him with drama addiction, that’s for sure – _and so did she._

The phone feels like titanium in his frantic, sweaty hand. Composing her number feels like – looks like it too, perhaps? He hopes not – one of those slow-motioned scenes meant to make you embarrassingly – the whole way until comic relief, that is – emotional that actually make you feel every single, tiny, needle-like sting a million times stronger.

It rings idly for what feels like hours, the metallic chime sounding sharper each time, until her voice answers, though it sounds different through a receiver. It’s not the way a voice feels shriller or steadier than it is in person, no. It’s the actual _change_ she has gone through ever since she went back to California.

( _Has it really been only a couple weeks back there and two years here?)_

“Hello?” She mumbles.

“Veronica,” his own voice surprises him. It’s firmer than the one he thought he’d manage.

For a moment, – a long, long moment – she is silent. Then, he hears it: a soft, slow, sudden, intake of breath. He can picture her holding her phone, pink lips barely parted for a heartbeat before she regains focus not letting anything shake her.

He swallows back the lump of sadness that has made its way up his throat along with that image, tightening his fingers around the shape of the phone so hard that they become white.

A moment is all it takes for the words – words long buried in his mind that had recently begun to pop up again on his tongue – to form and for his lips to trace them into the phone. “If you felt for me even a fraction of what you feel for Logan,” _have been feeling all along?_ “You would have already been on that plane by now.”

It’s not an accusation. He’s merely stating a fact.

His relationship with Veronica Mars ends while he’s on a pavement in New York City, holding his phone so close to his ear he’s sure it is going to leave a mark, his voice low and ~~angry~~ , no, disappointed, and keeping his distance from his parents, and she is back in Neptune, probably at her dad’s house, enjoying the thrill of the danger trying to save Logan’s ass will probably put her in.

-:-

He tries not to think of either of them, afterward.

Not when he goes back to ~~theirs~~ his, he corrects with a jerky voice, it’s his place now.

Not when he glimpses at the stuff that belongs to her – which will sit in a box by the wall, untouched, until she works the nerve to fly back up and get it – by mistake.

Not when he falls asleep alone, shivering in the loneliness.

Not when, a few years after it all happens, he catches a wedding article in a gossip magazine that reads: _Navy lieutenant marries long-known fiancèe on a California beach._

He goes on, drunk-texsting her only once: _I knew it was gonna be a thing in the end, Mars. Just make sure you lovebirds leave no more bloodshed behind, will you?_

Her response is quick, hopeful: _do me a favor, mind you, Piznarki? Be a man and make a move on Melissa. She’s been pinning over you for ages._

He does, and, eventually, Veronica Mars becomes nothing but a memory of his youth. Part joy, part regret over lost time for them both.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
